GUIÓN RADIAL

When we were gathered for another meeting on a different day, I found myself at the fringes of various conversations going on in the space before the meeting began. Voices were travelling in lines and curves, addressing one another directly now, and then suddenly moving sideways like crabs and referencing other bodies present in the space by name, but without necessarily drawing them into the conversation itself. Jokes were being made dime a dozen – self-targeted ones interspersed among jokes made at the expense of others, no discrimination made between those present and those who weren’t. “Tell her if you want to. I am not scared,” was someone’s response, when someone else claiming higher moral scruples pointed out that the object of her joke, absent in the space then, might take offense to it if she heard about it. Commands, taunts, requests, jokes, and come-backs overlapped, interrupted, deflected, crisscrossed, and cut across the space, linking people, drawing them in, pushing some away only to draw them back in again. They also reached farther away from the space, mentioning others who belonged but weren’t present, the very mention of their names conjuring a part of them there, and the narratives that followed doing the job of conjuring a little more of them, making holographic images, as it were, of people who were expected to be there but weren’t.

Some of the exchanges travelled in wide projectile arcs, with references lost on many, flying over many of the bodies, linking only two or three people in exclusive bonds, but only until someone from the outside chose to interrupt that flow. Some other

voices and words ricocheted within smaller confines, among bodies huddled together on the floor, voices lowered to confide secrets or whisper gossips. There were other voices and words that opened out like welcoming arms, landing on everyone with a quick but definite acknowledgment of presence, gesturing to draw everyone closer – the voices of the hosts of the meeting, coming towards each with a paper plate already sucking oil from the savoury vegetable puff pastry placed on it. Sounds of soda fizz, as large bottles of Fanta and Sprite were twisted open, their little plastic seals crackling, snapping, and giving in, punctuated the sounds that were chaotic but also organized in some complex, order-defying way.

While chewing on the first mouthful of the hot, oily, layered, and delicious vegetable puff, I found myself mentioned by name, my attention sought, tugged at, and pulled by a story. Vijaya was speaking:

Kumar, do you remember that conference in Delhi we went to? Must be ten years ago. That 377 meeting where I didn't understand a word anyone said? Aiiyo! Ani was there too. Ani, you translated in Tamil for a while, no? And then we lost interest. Too much was going on... Kumar, remember that man who was with the catering crew? Ani, I don't know if you remember. This boy was seesa panthi! I was looking at him, but he was looking at Kumar. Who did him finally, Kumar? You or me? I don't remember. I sucked so many dicks on that trip. (Field notes, May 2014)

All through Vijaya's recollection of travel and titillation, Kumar appeared very tentative. He opened his mouth a few times to sneak a word in, but couldn't. I understood his

confusion. He hadn’t been at that meeting in Delhi. Vijaya and I had been there, and her recollection of my translating from English and Hindi to Tamil was accurate. But we had not really known Kumar then. He looked a little confused, and it appeared like he wanted to correct Vijaya, but he didn’t. He looked at me, perhaps hoping I would set the story right, and I was about to, but I stopped myself. I suspected that there was more at stake in such sharing of anecdotes than the truthful recounting of past incidents, but I could not tease out what it was. So I nodded in the affirmative, and smiled, and someone asked if I was a lawyer, and I said I wasn’t.

It was not until I heard, over the course of the subsequent weeks, many such stories recollected and shared, that I got an inkling of what these narratives were doing, and what people were doing with these narratives. In fact, when I heard a different version of the above story on another occasion, I realized that my hearing it was not accidental: the story was coming up partly to reference me, to highlight my belonging in this community and the (alleged) longevity of my association with some of these people. This time, it was being narrated for the benefit of some younger and newer members who didn’t know me, and Vijaya used this anecdote to weave me into a narrative of belonging and shared work. This time, the anecdote did not highlight the sexual adventures we did or did not engage in; instead, it was focused on the fact that there had been a large national consultation on the status of the case against Section 377, and that we had travelled to Delhi for that “all those years ago.” With her friendly arm touching my hand, and occasionally moving to touch me on the small of my back in affection, Vijaya was using this story to present me to the younger kothis, to impress upon them the long period

of our association, and our shared work reaching beyond Chennai and Tamil Nadu to Delhi, the seat of the nation. In addition to that, the story also served to soften the anxiety of alienation I felt in introducing myself now also as an anthropologist in the making, visiting from America. The narrative, I realized, functioned as a capacious object that could, like the size-adjustable suitcases that have extra zippers to open and hold more things, shape- and size-shift and hold different projects. They could even hold different bodies (Kumar was not a big part of the story this time), cast their words as a net over a new and different “we” each time, foregrounding specific formations of solidarity, community, and friendship.

Some of the anecdotes I heard repeated during my stay and work in Chennai last summer were about experiences of crisis intervention: visits to police stations; fearful moments of facing the bigotry and hatred of parents who were unkind to their LGBT children, the bigotry of police officers, government officials, and others; the lack of infrastructure to do crisis response work; the sheer exhaustion that such work produces; and some moments of hilarity embedded within those experiences of uncertainty and stress. The narratives that were repeated at various times encompassed incidents of police violence on aravanis and kothis; cases of threat and extortion where gay and bisexual men were the victims; situations involving lesbian couples in distress and fleeing forced marriages and family violence; and occasions of intra-community crisis, where ‘false’ allegations of abduction and castration had been made by one younger aravani on some other aravanis. Each narrative covered a range of emotional textures: some of the stories began as a joke, while others were to highlight how much more difficult a situation in the

past was in comparison to a situation at hand. Typically, these narratives began with, “Oh, this is nothing. You can handle it. Some years ago…” or some variation on it.

There was also a plenty of recounting of experiences from previous meetings and discussions. With years and dates blurring into a haze of a shared patch of unspecific time, people’s passionate interventions or unexpected change in positions in other meetings and conversations were recalled and fondly remembered; or were brought to the fore to suggest that the person has had a complex trajectory so we should judge him or her less harshly, or embrace him or her more cautiously, or just understand the messiness of working with him or her.

Most of the narratives had a common template. They began with “Do you remember the time we ….?” or some version of such appeal to recollection and participation in the narrative act. The “we” thus appealed to or drawn into the narrative were different each time, depending on who was present and, more importantly, on who was absent. Those who were considered an important part of the emotional texture of the moment of coming together but could not be physically present for some reason or another were brought into existence, so to speak, by these narratives of memory. The “we” of these stories was a capacious space that could hold many bodies, and slightly different ones in each retelling. They were anchored in the truth of a past occurrence, but their owed their allegiance not to the truth of details but to the truth of a shared affect, a shared slantedness towards one another. The effect of these narratives was, in fact, to construct a “we” through the very narration and not to retell an incident or experience as it occurred. Truthful retelling was not the point of this exercise. Instead, the point was to

bring in different bodies into a collective sense of belonging, a “we,” and to highlight a past, to emphasize their relationship over time, and to mark a moment where they shared an experience together as “sexual minorities” as opposed to a “general public.”

Exclusions of other kinds:

In one instance, this articulation of a specific idea of community happened in a more explicit way. Kavitha, a kothi, had problems with a few aravanis and kothis attending Pride planning meetings and with taking part in some of the events. The reason she gave for it was that they had, in the recent past, proven to be of questionable integrity in their work in HIV/AIDS intervention projects. In addition to that, Kavitha alleged that one of them had also inflicted physical and emotional violence on another kothi. In arguing against including them in an event, of which I was a co-organizer, Kavitha said:

Just being a kothi does not make you community. You have to behave accordingly. You cannot be a cheat, you cannot be a liar, an embezzler, you cannot treat people from your community badly, hurt them, harm them, and also want to keep saying, “I am community, I am community.” You can have a card from the Welfare Board saying you are an Aravani. But community is a different feeling. (Field notes, May 2014)

In her argument, Kavitha was suggesting explicitly that membership to the community needs more than the identity category. For her, acting in ways that cause harm or hurt to fellow members is a serious disqualification. But this situation led to more complexification of the idea of a community. When Kavitha’s and many others’ voices

against including these specific aravanis and kothis (I shall call this group Team B for the purpose of convenience) from the Coalition’s events grew stronger, it caused considerable dilemma among others who were not sure of enacting such exclusion without having a serious conversation. When I and two others, who were part of organizing some of the Pride month events, met with the kothis and aravanis in question to communicate the strong opposition they were facing, they argued that they had not been given a proper opportunity to state their case about the allegations of dishonesty and violence for a long time. During a long and difficult conversation, they also argued that, in the absence of such open and equal opportunity so far to state their side of the case, they should be allowed to participate. In the subsequent planning meeting, these questions were raised for discussion with the members of the coalition. I could not be present at this meeting, since I was sick, but I was called on the phone to state my opinion. A few of us were of the opinion that everyone should be allowed to participate or that specific event could be cancelled as a gesture of being fair to all parties involved. However, a strong majority of the members were against including team B, but they were also against cancelling the event, since many of their groups had already spent much time and energy rehearsing their performances. This messy situation was resolved by taking a vote, which, predictably, resulted in the decision to exclude team B. Voting, at once a democratic and a majoritarian exercise, was used to quickly get past the messiness of the situation. This turned out to be a situation where a certain ethical notion of community was used as a reason for exclusion and for practical resolution of a complex situation, and I was very much party to it. In the conversations that happened among a small group of

three or four of us over several occasions, we reflected on the very shape-shifting idea of community that the situation had revealed. Different criteria for membership and belonging seem to get foregrounded depending on the exigencies of the situation at hand and on the pressure exerted by some predominant affect which pulls, aligns, and affects bodies to collective face certain directions, determining the course and direction of action.

Dis/orientations, Cruel Attachments, and Impasses:

Like I have highlighted in the earlier part of the essay, the people with whom I have worked in Chennai, and whose voices animate the ethnographic moments in this piece, have never had illusions about the structural differences among them – differences in terms of class, caste, cultural capital, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Therefore, the sense of solidarity they highlight through these narratives is not one that seeks to reinscribe the idea of an LGBT community as an unreflexive site of belonging for all those engaging in non-normative gender and sexual practices. On the contrary, many of the narratives I heard involved people who have always identified as allies and not as members of the LGBT community, which suggests that these stories were not foregrounding sexual and gender identity as the main or only locus of cohering. Instead, these narratives highlighted the importance of solidarities that had emerged organically over the years by virtue of having worked together, having had shared experiences. These narratives, I suggest, were a way to buy time, to postpone acting on those anxieties, and for the actors involved to orient themselves vis-à-vis the others whom they had come to

see as belonging in that space. The stories acted as orienting devices in a time of confusion and disorientation.

Sara Ahmed’s discussion of disorientation as a queer affect is useful to my analysis here. Her formulation of disorientation opens up fresh ways for thinking about our slantedness towards and away from the objects around us, our reliance on them to ground and stabilize us. Arguing that rather than seeing disorientations as calls for repair and re-orientations to familiar objects and spaces, for queer and racialized bodies, “to live out a politics of disorientation might be to sustain wonder about the very forms of social gathering” (Ahmed 2006, 24). Ahmed speaks of comfort and ease as results of bodies lining up along straight lines, which in turn have been created merely by the repeated alignment of other bodies – bodies that came before, bodies that exist now – along those directions (Ahmed 2006, 157). When bodies fail, for various reasons, to line up along these straight lines, disorientation occurs. Speaking of disorientation as an affect produced when those objects and narratives that have become “socially and bodily given” fail to ground us, Sara Ahmed asks us to consider “what we do with such moments of disorientation, as well as what such moments can do” (Ahmed 2006, 158).

The members of the Chennai Rainbow Coalition I worked with used stories of past experiences as a way to orient themselves, to populate the space with objects/ people they were familiar with and considered close. Extending the connotations of “oblique” and “off line” that are associated the word “queer,” Sara Ahmed asks, “… how are we orientated toward queer moments when objects slip. Do we retain our hold on these objects by bringing them back “in line”? Or do we let them go, allowing them to acquire

new shapes and directions?” (Ahmed 2006, 172). The object, in this case, is the sense of belonging in an LGBT community as a site where engagement in non-normative sexual and gender practices is considered an adequate locus of social and political solidarity. Though for the community members, at least the ones I worked with, such an idea of the sexual as a singular enough locus for a politics was already suspect; though discussions of differences and insensitivity to differences were never shied away from; ‘LGBT’ has continued to serve as a way of cohering and foregrounding a politics of the sexual minority. However, with the Supreme Court’s refusal to decriminalize homosexuality, and with its advancement of rights to transgendered persons, the crucial differences in focus and priorities have been brought to light in a way that cannot be ignored. Like I showed in the ethnographic section in the beginning of this essay, conversations about what solidarities are productive, who belongs with whom, should one support from the “inside” or “outside” were beginning to happen. All of which, I suggest, were causing an object – the sense of an LGBT community – to slip away, which in turn caused a disorientation of sorts.

If “cruel optimism” is characterized by the attachment to an object despite knowing that continued attachment to that object is unproductive (if not altogether detrimental to oneself), because the idea of giving up that attachment seems unimaginably painful, then it would not be farfetched to say that an attachment to the idea of an LGBT politics, movement, and community, despite knowing its problems and messiness, is characterized by cruel optimism of a kind. The force of that attachment is perhaps because, as Lauren Berlant suggests, “its life-organizing status can trump

interfering with the damage it provokes” (Berlant 2011, 227). For the LGBT community has both been a space of acceptance and transformation for many of us in India; the idea of an LGBT community has been the place where our acute feelings of abnormality and loneliness have been attenuated. Indeed, membership in this community has also (re)organized the lives of most of the people discussed in this paper. Therefore, in spite of knowing the erasures and elisions created by foregrounding the sense of an LGBT community, it has been difficult for all of us involved as members to relax the hold on that attachment to see if any other mode of doing politics/ being political would be more productive.8 _{And when forces of governmentality (the judiciary in this case), which are}

the agencies appealed to by this very politics, have stepped in and highlighted, instead, the cruel optimistic nature of this attachment, the effect of it has been the creation of an impasse. Lauren Berlant’s discussion of impasse as “a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic” is a very